Taeyeon feels her head swim when Jessica finally pulls away from her, eyes dark and huge and dazed like she’s drunk. Taeyeon feels a little drunk herself. She her lips involuntarily and tastes Jessica on them, something sweet and a little sour, like citrus or unrealized dreams.

“Jessica,” she says, her voice cracking on the last syllable. “What was…why did you…”

“You still don’t understand.” Jessica sounds sad but not entirely disappointed, like she had hoped against this but had expected it nonetheless. “I don’t know what more I have to do. I—” She breaks off, turning her face away, and Taeyeon feels a spam of guilt leap like a pulled muscle inside her.

“Jessica—” She has no idea what to say, which turns out not to matter, because she doesn’t get a chance to say it. Just then, Krystal walks into the room, takes one look at Jessica’s slumped shoulders and bowed head, and shoots Taeyeon a glare that could have frozen hell over.

“Unnie, what’s wrong?” Krystal hurries to Jessica’s side and sets a hand on her shoulder, putting herself right between her and Taeyeon.

Jessica lifts her head, giving a small smile that fools no one. Her face is blank again, but maybe Krystal can read that expression.

“I’m fine, Krys,” she says in a toneless voice. “My head just hurt, that’s all.”

“Do you want me to get you some medicine?”

“No, no medicine.” Jessica’s hand, which was previously limp by her side, darts to her chest for a moment before she puts it to her temple. “I’m fine. It was just for a second.”

“Unnie—”

“I’m fine, Krystal,” Jessica insists, her voice sharper now. “I think I just need some rest.” She doesn’t look at Taeyeon when she says this, but it’s a clear dismissal.

“You heard unnie,” Krystal says coldly to Taeyeon. “She wants to be alone.”

“Jessica,” Taeyeon starts helplessly.

Jessica is still avoiding eye contact. “Please just leave, Taeyeon,” she says quietly, her voice weighed down with weary helplessness. “Please just listen to me for once.”

She looks at Taeyeon then, and there it is again, that wet glimmer in her eyes. It isn’t quite tears yet, but it isn’t far from that, and it’s because of Taeyeon, yet again.

It seems that all she gives Jessica is pain.

“I’m sorry,” Taeyeon mumbles, reaching out a hand, but Jessica flinches away from her imperceptibly and she drops it. “But not about—before.”

She’s not sorry for kissing Jessica back. She can’t say that she’s thought about this before, because she didn’t, she didn’t see Jessica that way, or at least she thought she didn’t, but…

“I’m sorry I—don’t understand.” Taeyeon clears , glancing at Krystal, who somehow looks bewildered and yet unsurprised. At least she’s not shooting daggers at Taeyeon with her eyes anymore. “I guess I’ll just…go now.”

Jessica doesn’t say anything, turning her head away even further, so all Taeyeon can see is the line of her profile. Impulsively, acting on instinct, Taeyeon leans in and brushes her lips against Jessica’s temple. Jessica’s whole body stiffens, like they’ve never touched before, like they weren’t just pressed together kissing minutes ago.

“Get some rest, okay?”

Taeyeon walks to the door, and she hesitates there, although she’s not sure why. Jessica opens like she’s going to say something, but then she closes it and lowers her head, her posture spelling out weariness and defeat. It makes Taeyeon hurt for her yet again.

“Taeyeon unnie, Mom made some soup for you guys too,” Krystal says, her voice not gentle but not ungentle either. “She has a thermos twice the size of my head. Don’t forget to get it before you leave.”

“I won’t,” Taeyeon says automatically. “Jessica, I – bye.” Jessica doesn’t reply, and resigned, Taeyeon turns away to leave. With her back to the room, right at the edge of the doorstep, she adds, “I told you not to stop. And I meant it.”

Jessica says nothing. Somehow, her silence speaks more than words. Taeyeon leaves, collecting the enormous thermos of soup from Mrs. Jung with an obligatory smile and a hollow-sounding “thank you, ahjumma”.

She’s walking down the driveway when she realizes what she was waiting for at Jessica’s door. She was waiting for Jessica to call her back, to ask her to stay, the way she had at the hospital. But Jessica hadn’t; she hadn’t said anything at all, and it had hurt.

And that’s how Taeyeon knows.

“How was Jessi?” Tiffany asks brightly. “Is she feeling better?”

“Yeah, she is,” Taeyeon answers numbly, somehow maintain enough of a calm front to elude Tiffany. “She was even complaining that she slept too much.”

“Oh no, it must be the end of the world then,” Yuri says, joining them. Tiffany shifts over on the couch to make room for her, and she sits on the other side of Tiffany, stretching her long legs out.

“Yeah,” Taeyeon agrees faintly. “It must be.”

“Did something happen?” Yuri’s brows knit together. “You don’t look so well.”

Well, Jessica kissed me, and I kissed her back, and we kind of started making out, but then Krystal came in and things happened and—I don’t even know what’s going on anymore.

“I think I’m tired.” That’s not a lie, at least. She is tired, in more ways than one. “I haven’t been sleeping too well lately.”

“You haven’t,” Tiffany agrees. “You should sleep more. We’re not even promoting right now; there’s no reason you should be doing this to yourself.”

“She’s Taeyeon,” Yuri points out. “That’s a reason right there.”

Taeyeon laughs; it sounds forced and empty even to her ears. She knows she can’t hide this from them for long, especially not Tiffany, who can read her all too well, but there’s no way she can tell them either. She couldn’t even if she wanted to. How can you describe what you don’t even understand?

“Maybe I’ll take a nap.” She massages her temples, feeling the beginning of a headache coming on. Then again, if she let herself, if she didn’t hold it back with all her reserves of restraint and sheer willpower, she would feel like this practically every day. It’s a good thing she’s become an expert at pushing her body beyond its limits, a good thing they all have. “I think I could use one.”

“I think you should,” Tiffany says gently.

“I think so too,” Yuri says. “You deserve many naps.”

“I do have about six years to catch up on.”

“Well.” Tiffany smiles. “You can always get Jessi to give you napping lessons.”

Taeyeon seizes up at the mention of Jessica, and without volition, her mind flashes to Jessica’s bed and the things they were doing on it that had nothing to do with sleeping. At one point Jessica’s hand went under her shirt, but she didn’t try to do anything further, she just kept it on Taeyeon’s stomach like she wanted to know the feel of her skin there. It wasn’t unpleasant or intrusive, not in the slightest. It wasn’t unwanted either.

“I think one person who sleeps like the dead is enough,” Yuri says. “It’s already a pain to wake Sica up in the mornings; I don’t want Taengoo to be like that too.”

“I don’t think you can learn to sleep the way Jessi does anyway,” Tiffany says thoughtfully. “I don’t think you can learn to do most of the things she does, period.”

“She’s one unique snowflake, isn’t she?”

“Snowflake, where’d you get that from?”

“You know, ice princess, ice, snow…” Yuri trails off as Tiffany starts laughing. “I thought that was a good metaphor. Wasn’t it a good metaphor?”

“Yes, yes, it was an amazing metaphor. You should be a poet, Kwon Yuri.”

Taeyeon watches Tiffany and Yuri ‘bicker’ with a small smile. It’s strange, she thinks, how she never got jealous over Tiffany and Yuri, given how close they are. Her jealousy had only been towards Jessica. It seems like a very long time ago now, but at the same time too clear in her memory for her liking.

“TaeTae?” Tiffany asks. “Why are you just staring at us and smiling?”

“What?” Taeyeon blinks. “Is that what I’m doing?”

“Yes,” Yuri tells her. “It’s pretty creepy, actually.”

“I can’t help it; you guys are cute.”

Tiffany’s eyes disappear as she gives her signature smile, and Taeyeon watches as Yuri stares blatantly and obviously and draws her eyes away rather too late. Taeyeon raises a mental eyebrow, but she doesn’t say anything.

“Did you hear that, Yul?” Tiffany latches onto Yuri’s arm. “We’re cute.”

“It’s you, really. I’m just cute by association.”

“No, you’re adorable.” Tiffany pinches Yuri’s cheek, and Yuri makes a face, but she doesn’t actually look annoyed. “Trust me, I know cute when I see it. I have good taste.”

“You do,” Yuri says, something slightly different about her voice. “You have such a cute boyfriend, after all.”

Tiffany’s happy expression falters slightly, and she puts up another smile, somehow both brighter and dimmer than her last one. “I do,” she agrees, eyes soft and somber. “He is very cute.”

“As cute as me?” Taeyeon cuts in, light and teasing, trying to loosen up the atmosphere.

Tiffany gives Taeyeon a startled sort of look, like she’s forgotten she was there, and she smiles. “I feel like I’m back in elementary school and I’m being asked to rank my friends. Come on, you guys are better than that.”

Taeyeon glances at Yuri, who looks rather tight-lipped. “I don’t know, Fany,” she says. “Yuri’s with Yoona and Hyoyeon all the time; I think the choding has rubbed off on her.”

“It’s okay, Yul,” Tiffany says. “I’ll still love you even if you’re a child.”

Yuri laughs then, elbowing Tiffany playfully. “Should I be touched?”

“Yes, you should be,” Tiffany tells her, tugging her arm and somehow rearranging herself into a backhug in the same movement. Just like that, they’re back to normal, smiling and touchy and fond as always. Taeyeon feels like she’s getting whiplash just watching them.

“Taengoo, weren’t you going to take a nap?” Yuri asks, Tiffany’s arms wrapped around her, her head resting on Yuri’s shoulder.

“I don’t feel so tired anymore,” Taeyeon says honestly. Just being with them, watching them, has energized her. And anyway, when she thinks about taking a nap on her bed, she just thinks about another bed, and Jessica looking at her with mussed hair and kiss-swollen lips and eyes that could have swallowed her whole.

There’s no way she could fall asleep.

“You should still sleep though.” Tiffany frowns. “You need the rest, even if you don’t feel like it right now.”

“And who knows,” Yuri says cheerfully. “You might have a nice dream.”

“Yeah, maybe.” But the dream that she wants isn’t so much the sleeping kind. She wants to see Jessica again, to see her smile, to make her smile, and to know that she won’t be gone like a dream in the morning. She wants Jessica, and the realization takes her breath away, unsettles her, burrows under her skin and refuses to move until it’s not just acknowledged but accepted. “I might.”

“You look like you want to vaporize that paper,” Sooyoung notes, taking a seat beside Taeyeon. “What did it do to you?”

“Huh?” Taeyeon brushes her hair away from her eyes, blinking hard as the world comes back into focus. She’s been staring out aimlessly but so intently that her eyes are dry and prickling, and she feels like a swimmer breaking the surface of the water and seeing the world in a new light.

Sooyoung taps the open, blank notebook in front of Taeyeon. Well, nearly blank. She’d written exactly one word in it.

“‘Eyes’,” Sooyoung reads.

“Yeah, I was—I don’t know.”

“Songwriting?”

She frowns. “Not exactly. I guess I was just…trying to get some ideas down.”

“I’m guessing it didn’t work out too well,” Sooyoung says sympathetically.

Taeyeon stares at the almost blank page, at the single word she’d written, and in her mind, she can see the pair of eyes that she was thinking about when she wrote that word down. She can see them so clearly she feels like she’s looking at a photograph, except a photo couldn’t hope to capture the life and light in those eyes, how they could be bright and dark, contained and containing at the same time.

The headache feels like it’s returning, only it’s not so much pain as it is a steady pressure at the backs of her eyes, a reminder of the sight she couldn’t shed even though she wasn’t looking at it.

“I don’t think songwriting is for me.” Taeyeon pushes the notebook away from her, as if she could banish her thoughts that way. “At least not the lyrics part.”

“I feel like the lyrics are harder to figure out than the music,” Sooyoung says. “Then again, words are just hard in general.”

“They are,” Taeyeon agrees with soft weariness.

“It’s alright, Taengoo.” Sooyoung reaches out and takes Taeyeon’s hand, squeezing it. “Don’t you remember? You were the one who said that words weren’t always necessary. Some things don’t need to be said to be heard. To be known.”

Sooyoung’s hand is warm and firm around her own; not securing, just grasping. Taeyeon wants to squeeze back, but her hand feels limp and uncooperative, and the same when she tries to smile.

“Maybe I said that because I don’t like to talk.”

“Maybe you did,” Sooyoung acknowledges, “but I still remember what you said after, that we don’t need to say things like ‘thank you’ and ‘I love you’ to each other, because we already know that. And we do, Taeyeon, we know that.”

“I know you do, but you still want to hear it from me, don’t you?”

Sooyoung smiles a little. “It’s human nature to want to hear that you’re loved. To know it and to hear it can be two different things.”

Taeyeon looks at the paper in front of her again, and then she takes her pencil and adds another word on the page, her finishing so hard the lead breaks and leaves a streak of black on the paper.

Eyes, and then, Love. She doesn’t know what that means; it’s far from a song, and she hadn’t meant it to be lyrics, or to be symbolic, or to be anything, really. She just wrote it, because it felt right at the moment, a release of something that she doesn’t want to examine, just wants to expel.

“‘Some things don’t need to be said to be heard’,” Taeyeon repeats quietly. “That’s a nice saying.”

“Isn’t it?” Sooyoung’s smile widens slightly. “Jessica said it to me.”

The pencil slips from Taeyeon’s hand, slides down the table, and is headed to the floor until she grabs it automatically, at the edge of the table, right before it falls.

“Did she?”

“You went to see her, right?” Sooyoung leans forward, eyes bright and anticipatory. “How did she look? Is she almost all better? When is she coming back?”

Taeyeon replies automatically and succinctly, wanting to give Sooyoung her answers, nothing more, nothing less.

“She looked fine. She’s recovering well. She should be back soon.”

Sooyoung blinks. “You sound very enthusiastic about that.”

“I—” There are a hundred ways to finish that sentence, and each possibility seems worse than the last. “I want her back. You know that.”

Sooyoung’s face softens. “I think we all know that.”

“I miss her,” Taeyeon says quietly, her fingers uncurling from the pencil. “It’s not the same without her.”

“It’s not,” Sooyoung says wistfully. “I almost miss waking her up in the mornings.”

“Do you?”

“Okay, no, I don’t. That was painful. It’d be kind of masochistic to miss that.”

She must be a bit of a masochist then. It would just be one more item on the ever-growing list of things that she’s discovering about herself. It sounds wise, helpful, instrumental, even, to learn more about yourself, and maybe it is all of those things, but all Taeyeon can think right now is that it’s painful.

It’s painful, and she’s had enough pain, but evidently it hasn’t had enough of her. Maybe she isn’t a masochist then; maybe she’s just some kind of magnet for pain, a giver and taker of it.

The thought of that doesn’t make her feel any better.

A/N: The part with eyes being “contained and containing at the same time” is taken off The Draco Trilogy by Cassandra Claire.

Taeyeon really did say the part about “thank you” and “I love you” being unnecessary between them, because that’s how well they know and love each other. I’ve lost the source where I found that though, so if someone knew and could tell me, that’d be great.